Category Archives: Knitting Basics

Down below C building lobby lurks a very colorful room that half of the student body at FIT has never seen. This is the place we knitters call home!

We are super lucky to have this awesome resource at school. There are several types of machines that realistically we would never have the opportunity in the industry to work on, and/or own.

Before we get this collection blog going, I figure it is important that the readers who aren’t knitters have a basic understanding of the machines that I’m sure I will often refer to!

Lets start with the Brother: These machines are small hand knitting beds. In the lab they are single bed (making jersey fabric) but occasionally a ribber bed is attached to the machines (with allows us to make rib fabrics also). These machines have your basic settings, you can short row (making flare, or shaping), and you can create Jacquards/intarsia/tucks/lace.

Then we have the Dubied: Which is my personal favorite. This is the machine that my friend Eric (above) is knitting on. It is a double bed machine also (creating rib fabric) but has the means to be used as a single bed machine. It has a huge amount of possibilities for fabric variations and color combinations.

Finally the Stoll machines…. well these were actually sent to us from heaven. Stoll machines are insane. They are completely electronic and can literally knit an entire sweater in some odd 20 minutes. It’s amazzzzingg. These machines are really rare in the industry but are so beyond highly renowned that every knit company undoubtedly knows about them. It is so cool that we get to learn on them… and witness the capabilities of the machines. This section of the lab is probably where the most excitement will go down this semester… but also the most chaos due to how technologically advanced the machines are.